How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Web Design

26 Apr How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Web Design

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the most widely discussed technology these days as it is slowly seeping into every aspect of our daily lives, even when we’re not aware of it. While some predict AI conquering and dominating the human race, others are more focused on its practical potential — after all, AI is just a human-made product.

The technology (or rather a cluster of intertwined technologies) is already disrupting the world of web design and development as well. Not only can it help designers customize their work and provide a better user experience, but apparently, now it can code too.

Here’s how AI is changing web design.

It Helps Provide Better User Experience

AI is helping designers make websites much more user-friendly and provide a seamless user experience. Various AI-based tools are making sites much more responsive, adaptive, and engaging for the user. A great example of such software, and the one that’s perhaps the most widely used for now, is a chatbot.

AI-based bot platforms are so advanced that they can provide great customer service, onboard customers, assist them with the payment process, handle complaints, give recommendations, and much more.

Thanks to the machine learning (ML) abilities of these bots as well as their natural language processing (NLP) component, they can interact with users and understand complex human language. What’s more, they can learn from these interactions and become even better at servicing web users over time.

These convenient AI bots allow users to interact with the website much more easily and efficiently.

It Makes User Interface Design Easier

Have you ever wished you could simply sketch a layout of your desired website with a pen and paper and magically make it into a real site? Well, thanks to AI, there are now many tools that allow you to do just that.

For example, Uizard and Google’s Sketch2Code allow you to snap a photo of your hand-drawn sketch and translate it into a high-end prototype complete with front-end code. You can also make an image of your design, upload it to another AI-based tool called Fronty, and get a front-end code automatically.

Last year, there was also a lot of talk about OpenAI’s language model called GPT-3. This model pushes the frontier of AI abilities when it comes to generating human-like text. However, it can also be tweaked to write code. Unlike the previously mentioned tools, GPT-3 can design website layouts using verbal cues only. You simply type what you want, and the program generates it.

AI Allows for Customization

AI-based tools can read consumers like an open book, i.e., it can follow and interpret their behavior on a site and tailor their experience accordingly. For example, when a user opens an e-commerce site, there are plugins and extensions based on AI that can track their behavior, their purchases and searches, and offer more customized products based on their preferences.

However, ecommerce sites are not the only ones being customized for a more personalized user experience. We’re all familiar with the popular platforms Spotify and Netflix. These sites use the same AI-guided principles to make accurate predictions as to what users may want to hear and see.

There are also speculations that the future of web design will be much more fluid thanks to AI. That is to say that we might soon experience a trend of shape-shifting designs, instead of rigid, fixed ones, that will be different for each user.

It’s Important for Speech Recognition

As many as 41% of people use voice search every day. Since the emergence of Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, and other similar software, speech recognition has become much more important and widely used. So optimizing a site for voice search is an absolute must.

How is voice recognition connected with AI? The process of making software understand natural speech is extremely complex. The sound waves need to be converted into a digital format. Then, complex algorithms work the data to interpret the speech and provide an adequate response.

When the software doesn’t recognize our speech, it makes the best guess. This is the doing of AI, which is able to interpret our words beyond their individual meaning and syntax and delve into the realm of semantics and pragmatics.

AI Is Great as a Design Diagnostic Tool

As pros know all too well, web design is about much more than making the site attractive-looking. It needs to be perfectly optimized, perform well, and satisfy all the increasingly complex Google standards.

What’s more, a developer’s job is not done when the site is up and running. They need to perform periodical tests to assess the site’s functionality. These tests are tiresome, and they take a lot of time. Since the tests affect the source code, they can also mess with the site’s performance.

However, AI-powered diagnostics tools are a much more “lightweight” option for assessing the quality of your design and keeping track of its performance. They can automate these processes and eliminate many steps along the way.

ADI — Artificial Design Intelligence

As we have seen, there are many AI tools that can facilitate the creative process of web design, but some human agency is still required. Even with web elements creation using GPT-3, you’re still the one who brings ideas to the table — the software just executes them.

ADI or artificial design intelligence is a relatively fresh concept, which is only just beginning to find uses. The idea behind it is to have a program build a site for you based on your wants, needs, and preferences, i.e., on its data on you.

While the concept is still mostly just an idea people are toying around with, the website building platform Wix has created something similar. By getting answers to some questions, Wix ADI gets the idea of who you are and what you want and generates a template for you in minutes.

The software is far from perfect, but it is an important innovation in the world of web design, which may change the way we create websites for good.

Jennifer Wilson is a writer at Qeedle.com She knows business processes and operations management inside out. As she understands all the challenges of running a small business firsthand, it’s her mission to tackle the topics that are most relevant to entrepreneurs and offer viable solutions.

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